Why, why, why, Delilah?

I recently recorded a podcast episode for higher-level backers of the Yoon-Suin 2nd edition kickstarter, in which I was subjected to some tough questions about certain aspects of the book. I liked the line of questioning, as I think it made the conversation much more interesting than a series of underarm throws ('Tell us exactly what else is brilliant about Chapter Four?'). But I wanted to expand in written form about an aspect of one question that particularly interested me.

The question was about what the interviewer called 'magical misandry', namely a theme which apparently (I hadn't realised this) crops up a few times in the book, and which I will describe as the 'Delilah motif'. This is the succubus-style female monster who uses magical or surreptitious means to deprive an, implicitly male, PC of his strength and vitality, or to kill or enslave him.

I name this the Delilah motif after the biblical character Delilah, who as you will know deprived Samson of his strength by cutting his hair while he lay across her thighs - it being strongly implied that this was after a bit of good old rumpy-pumpy. I am sure there are earlier examples if it in human myth, but this is familiar enough to have resonance.

The important thing about the Delilah motif is that, while we may disapprove of it or look askance at what it says about male-female relations, it also speaks in what I think is a very interesting way to a stereotyped feature of those relations which you can think of almost as the inverse, or evil twin, of the story of Beauty and the Beast. Why does Beauty and the Beast have particular power, such that it is basically the plot of almost every romance novel that has ever been written (woman meets strong, virile, wild male figure - vampire, pirate, werewolf, sadomasochist billionaire, etc. - and civilises him with her femininity)? It is because it speaks to a desire that appears to be deep-rooted in a great many people. The mythically or semiotically feminine transforms the mythically or semiotically masculine into something which can be good and productive in human society. Female love transforms the bad boy into a good man. And both women and men respond to that concept in fiction, at least in very large numbers.

(The list of confirmations of this truth are so many it is barely worth even beginning to start - I suppose we could write down 'Han Solo' and start from there.)

The Delilah motif interestingly and powefully inverts that notion by playing on the male fear of being civilised. Here I am drinking mead, eating syrup from the corpses of lions, swinging my dick in the wilderness and killing a thousand Philistines with the jawbone of a donkey, and it's great. And she wants me to settle down? Here feminine power is not portrayed as the redemptive power of love ('I've been saved by a woman...'), but as something which saps a man of his strength and vitality and ultimately weakens him to the point of incapacity. This is the stereotyped fear, familiar to us from sitcoms, soap operas and Hollywood movies, in the heart of the irresponsible male of being tied to a particular woman (it being no accident of course that Samson ends up being tied with rope after his seduction and impromptu short-back-and-sides). 

The Beauty and the Beast story and the Delilah motif exist in a state of productive tension in almost every romcom that ever was created, with the female character functioning as both transformative saviour and threat, and the male character functioning as both magnificent untamed beast and irresponsible fly-by-night, with the tension being finally resolved in balance of the former in both instances. And this is part of their charm and what (to a great many people) is part of the joy of male-female courtship rituals in their traditional form.

What monsters such as the succubus (and those of its ilk in Yoon-Suin) really do is simply trade on the Delilah motif in a way that, while it may not sit right in contemporary mores, strikes at the heart of that tension and essentially resolves it in the opposite direction to a romcom. You might even say that this is what the great many horror films that trade on that motif also do (whether as a minor incident, as in the opening to Phantasm, or as the whole plot of the film, as in Audition). They just tip the balance from Beauty and the Beast to Delilah.

And in that regard I don't think there is anything wrong with exploring that motif in D&D monster form. No, it isn't a healthy way to imagine male-female relationhips. But since when did any monster succeed by being a healthy reflection of anything? The point of a good monster is to disturb. And one way to effectively disturb people is to take a trope with which they are familiar - and which is extremely deep-rooted across cultures - and exploit it. So why not?